1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to client-server systems. More particularly, the present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for splicing proxied web requests with callback for subsequent requests.
2. Related Art
A proxy sits as an intermediary between clients and content servers. It provides features such as rules based routing of requests as well as security and caching. The development of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) splicing increased the performance of proxies by reducing resource utilization in terms of context switches and buffer copies between kernel to user and again from user to kernel, inherent in a typical proxy operation.
In its current form, a TCP splice call is made only once for associating an inbound and outbound socket to each other. This allows efficient utilization of resources. However, the primary drawback of this approach is the loss of control once the splice method is called. Currently, the proxy completely releases socket control, thereby losing the ability to make routing decisions on subsequent requests. This limits the use of splicing to tunneled traffic where the server endpoint does not change once the connection is established. The splice is automatically destroyed when either connection is closed.
Large responses and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 1.1 keep-alive requests are commonly handled by the proxy. The original TCP splicing mechanism does not take into account the persistent nature of these HTTP connections and the possibility of routing requests on a HTTP 1.1 connection to different content servers. With the advent of new streaming media and teaming applications, it is more common to see long lived responses from a content server. Although TCP splicing can boost performance in terms of resource utilization and better response times, it may actually degrade proxy performance for short lived connections.